Tag: field work

Mornings at the Çatalhöyük dig house were a chaos of tools and tea cups. Too many archaeologists were crammed into a small outpost in the middle of the dusty Anatolian plain and civility came later in the day, after breakfast. It is a very particular way of living that not everyone can cope with; in print I’ve compared it to Goffman’s Total Institution:

“a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life”

The specialists would retreat to their respective labs–paleobot, osteo, zooarch, lithics, pottery, finds–but the excavators would climb up the tell to escape, pushing squeaky wheelbarrows full of tools. The real prize was to be the first to get away, as you got the best tools and a wide open vista of blue sky and long, golden-brown grass. For a moment you could imagine that you were alone on that big hill, fat with archaeology and promise. And quiet. A little wind flapping the tent, but otherwise, gorgeous, gorgeous quiet.

Of course the chaos of the dig house would eventually clamor up the hill after you, and the day would roll on, but you’d hardly notice by then as you were stuck in, troweling, drawing, taking photos, bagging samples and artifacts. We were digging in Building 49, a smallish mudbrick building that fit onto a sheet of permatrace–so under 5m square, almost bijoux, but full of paintings and people buried underneath the floor.

All archaeologists are atheists, but we are all atheists with ghost stories. Actually, that is not even remotely true, I’ve met my share of witches and christians in the trench, and we are a profession ripe with superstition. I take it as part of my professional ethics not to believe in ghosts or anything remotely supernatural but if you study humans, then you must acknowledge a sort of placebo-effect of religiosity–if you believe it is true, then it is true for you. This is a convoluted way of saying that if you deal with the remains of people for long enough, you will eventually come across things that creep you the fuck out. Sometimes it’s not even in the ground.

So on that sunny, slightly misty morning in July, I pushed my rusty wheelbarrow up to the side of the trench. There was a fine layer of dew covering the archaeology, plaster floors, low, muddy walls, and pits where we’d dug several of the eventual 15 bodies to come out from beneath the floors of the house. I was preoccupied with a series of scrappy paintings layered on top of each other, black lines, then squiggles, then hands, then red.

That morning, there in the dew, a line of footprints snaked across the floors and platforms that we’d carefully uncovered the day before. I was digging with two other archaeologists that year and we all stood at the edge of the trench, staring down at the footprints. The feet that had made the prints were bare, medium sized, and it was obvious where they’d came out of the trench and left the tent. What wasn’t obvious is where they’d entered the trench.

You see, nobody was allowed on the tell outside of working hours. I’d worked on projects before where people had illicitly come in the night and messed around in the archaeology to hunt for whatever treasure they thought we were after. In this instance, nothing was out of place. Someone probably just had a sunrise amble across the tell. Barefoot. Yeah.

So after a little while we just got on with it, took out our tools and went to work. But we never figured out who took a stroll through the Neolithic that night and I remember wondering if we should have recorded the prints before I used a small brush to gently whisk them into oblivion.

With summertime coming around again, it is time for archaeologists to post photos of breathtakingly dangerous practice. I wonder sometimes if the digital age will eventually help improve practice at archaeological excavations through public censure and raised awareness. I’m not sure–my first Health & Safety for Academic Archaeologists (part 1) was posted in 2011 when I was shocked and outraged at stunning disregard for the wellbeing of workers displayed in photographs in the New York Times. But have things changed? Apparently not.

I was alerted to this particular instance from BAJR’s Facebook page, and there are nearly 100 similarly outraged comments below the link. The university backing the project has been notified by members of BAJR, but can we all agree to stop this now? This is not something that we should be teaching students. Projects that post photos like this should not be funded and should come under serious censure.

We need to do better. We need to teach proper health & safety to the next generation of archaeologists. We need to require project directors and supervisors receive rigorous training.

The Flickr group that I sporadically moderate, Archaeology in Action, is almost a decade old! I try to go in every couple of months and clean out the travel photos and such that inevitably creep in there. I’m always happy to see the fantastic contributions that the group attracts.

“At the end of excavation, the final rites. Mapungubwe, 1995, inhabited around 1200 AD is now a World Heritage Site. This was one of the last large scale excavations done on the site.” – Marius Loots

In some ways, it is an interesting practice in defining representation of the field. No, that isolated artifact in the museum is not “archaeology in action.” But if the conservator is working on it–sure. Ultimately, I have an audience in mind: those who want to see archaeologists at work in various contexts.

“Horton excavations 2013.” – Wessex Archaeology

While Flickr has been neglected over the years, and then overhauled in horrible, horrible ways, it is still a relatively good resource as an archive of photos that you can self-curate and distribute with Creative Commons licensing.

Stuart Piggott is my academic grandfather–the advisor of my advisor–and I’m sad that I never got to meet him, because all the stories I’ve heard about him are great. I was particularly delighted to find this story, in his own words from The Pastmasters:

My memories of this extraordinary occasion (working at Sutton Hoo in 1939 with Charles Philips) are those of mixed feelings of inevitable excitement at the splendour of the finds, and a sense of frightened inadequacy in making the drawings to record the burial deposit, in which every feature was unique and startling, and where no precedent existed to guide us. We had to keep the sensational nature of our finds secret, carrying back the most valuable pieces to the pub in Woodbridge where we stayed, and locking them in a suitcase to await Kendrick’s next visit to transfer them to the British Museum. Coming home one evening and making straight for the bar, I was met with the inevitable hearty greeting,

“How are the diggings, ole chap? Found any gold?”

“Yes, weighted down with it”, I answered, covertly grasping in my pocket the box containing the great belt-buckle, over 400 grammes (16 ounces) of solid metal.

“Ha! Ha! Jolly good. Have a drink?” I accepted, knowing the truth would not be believed.

I have to wonder how many finds got lost back in the day after a good evening in the pub. Raise your next pint to Professor Piggott, and his ridiculous goldy gold belt buckle.

After all of the horrible, dense, theoretical verbiage I’ve had to toss at the screen today, I got in the mood for a little storytelling, inspired by an exchange on twitter. Every archaeologist has their own bug stories, so I’ll share a few of mine. I’ve worked in a few places in the world, and each has their own array of flora and fauna. I run a strict no-kill policy in my trenches. Spiders, snakes, lizards, worms, we get it all, and I do my best to carefully move them to another place. I’ve also had goats, puppies, cows, raccoons, cats, and mice in my trenches, but we’ll stay away from the mammals for now. (Also a rather creepy set of barefoot human footprints on a restricted site that did not appear at all outside the trench…yeah.)

I did my first field work in Texas, where there are an uncommon quantity and quality of bugs. There are the generalized menace bugs, such as horseflies, ticks, centipedes, chiggers, and fire ants and these are pretty much a fact of life. Add that to poison oak, poison ivy, heat stroke, and the fact that every single goddamn plant south of Austin is sharp, it can make survey pretty miserable. There’s a plant called crucifixion thorn that doesn’t even have leaves, only thorns…and the horse cripplers and the bull nettles. But again, I’m not here to talk about plants.

I was working with John Lowe (was it the Siren site?) when I got a mean set of chiggers. Chiggers aren’t well known to the rest of the world, but they’re mean little mites that like to burrow through your socks and give you a terribly itchy bite. They burrow into your skin, eat a little bit of you, and then fall back out again. They tend to leave horrible mountains of pus on me…not so pleasant. The next day my co-worker Tina and I stumbled into a seed tick nest, which makes you look like a poppy seed bagel, all covered in tiny little black spots that are biting you. When I got back to my hotel room I picked them off, squishing them between my thumbnails until they popped. I stopped counting at 70. Finally, I got bitten by a spider while riding in the site vehicle back to the office, which left an egg-sized welt on my inner wrist.

A few days later, big lumps started forming all along my shins and upper arms. I ignored it until my joints started seizing up and I couldn’t walk anymore. I went to the doctor and it was one of those things where they started calling in more and more people to check me out. Turns out I got Erythema nodosum, an autoimmune response, in my case, to “excessive envenomation.”

One more story, and I’ll call it a night. I have to get back to the ol’ dissertation. There’s a lot of spiders around, including the pregnant camel spider I have pictured above (it’s actually a bit small for a camel spider), the bright green spiders that come out alongside your trench when it’s over 100F, and the baby tarantulas that are in tunnels they burrow in the ground and flop out wetly into your trench when you accidentally expose them. I was at another site in South Texas, lovely site, basically a riverbed with lovely cherty gravels and some questionable paleoindian artifacts mixed in. I’m afraid that my employer didn’t get their full day of work from me, as I spent at least a solid hour watching a tarantula fight a tarantula hawk. Tarantula hawks are large wasps that like to find tarantulas and paralyze them, drag them back into their nest, and lay their eggs in their still-living bodies. Pretty cool stuff.

This dance lasted a long time, the tarantula waving its front legs around, trying to run away, the gorgeous black and russet wasp diving in again and again. Finally, the wasp got behind it and I could see the tarantula twitching as it was stung with the long stinger. The wasp dragged the tarantula for what seemed like ages. I’d go and sort rocks and then come back and the thing was still dragging the big hairy spider around. Finally it disappeared somewhere, I’m assuming the burrow, and all was peaceful again.

A lot of people will kill bugs first thing when they see them, and I slap mosquitos and fire ants like anyone else. But checking out a preying mantis, or those ridiculous big black beetles as big as your thumb that would turn over on their backs and just helplessly twitch at Catalhoyuk, finding a ridiculous looking caterpillar, being tasted by butterflies…it’s just another reason I love archaeology. Bitey, evil bugs and all.

As I mentioned in the last post, we are digging deep at 100 Minories. We finished up last week at a depth of around 7.5 meters beneath the ground surface. Working this deep is extremely dangerous and we are given a long brief about all the equipment required, called an induction. We are in a testing phase, basically exploring the depth of the deposits while evaluating our needs for post-excavation specialists (pottery, animal bone, etc) so that L – P Archaeology knows how how much to charge for excavating the entire area. Evaluating trenches are used sparingly as they are understood to potentially interfere with the broader archaeological sequence. Preservation by record–fully excavating and recording all of the deposits impacted by the building–is standard operation in the City of London (different from just London London). London archaeologists consider these 2x2m test trenches as inferior for interpretation and while they are recorded meticulously, they are used to evaluate the presence or absence of cultural remains and are not used as a primary excavation technique as they are in the States. Basically, yes, there were Romans here, no we cannot characterize their lifeways from digging a phone booth through their deposits.

For example, there was some debate over whether to call this feature that Neralie is cleaning brick paving or a garden path:

While the pit is roughly 2x2m Neralie is standing in a 1x1m that was excavated in the corner to determine a further sequence–we were not allowed to remove architecture in this case as the site may not go to full excavation…in theory, at least. You’ll also notice that she has 2m of concrete above her, and no shoring, as the concrete was determined to be stable. She does have a superstructure over the pit to ensure that nobody falls in:

In the 1×1 she is down about 1.20m from the bottom of the concrete, at that point shoring was installed.

Checking out these test trenches was an interesting return to squares after digging in open plan for many seasons. We do not collect all of the finds, just a sample to characterize each context, again to determine which specialists we’ll need to look at the materials from the site. The top trench has reached what passes for “natural” here, river terraced gravels, but it can still contain “monkey rocks”–the rather unique term that London archaeologists use for mesolithic artifacts. Another term that I’ve only heard here is “plus.” I’ve drawn them plenty, the little plus-sign at the top of the Harris matrix that indicates surface, or no previous deposits. Here “plus” can be material remains–all of the modern intrusions that are not recorded in detail are called plus and are dug out before the matrix begins. Sorry, contemporary archaeologists! Though with 7m of strat to record, the “messed-about” nature of the surface deposits in a place that is as heavily occupied as London, and the time/money calculation always running in the project manager’s head, I can’t find much to criticize. Criticise. Whatever.

Lest you think we are entirely crassly indifferent to more modern garbage, these were saved from the fills associated with the construction of the brutalist concrete building at 100 Minories that will be destroyed before we continue work. It’s a Coke can that you have to open with one of the old can-openers and two tags that had “1961” written on the back of them. They were near some rebar found in test pit #4, and probably were attached at some point.

The evaluation trenches are closed now–we’ll move off site today and I’ll be back in California in a little more than week’s time. I’ve enjoyed my crash course in London archaeology, and hopefully I’ll be back for more in the Spring.

The scene from last week really should have been filmed in grainy black and white–classic 1-2 head shot, reaction shot, static-strafed classical music in the background:

(Fade in – A tiny office, somewhere hot and dusty, the site director and the field archaeologist, talking over tea)

Site Director: “There’s an archaeological site that was excavated forty years ago, but has since been lost. We want you to find it.”

Field Archaeologist: (straightening her pith helmet) Absolutely, sir. I will find you your missing site.

(cut to the windiest, bleakest desert you’ve ever seen)

Though the desert part is accurate, the rest of the montage that follows is considerably less romantic. We found Beatrice de Cardi’s volume from her ten-week season in 1973, made a photocopy of the aerial photography of the site, Al-Huwailah, and noted the description of the location. (Marginalia – the report was actually written by Peter S. Garlake, who got fired by the Rhodesian government as the Inspector of Monuments–he wouldn’t deny the African origins of Great Zimbabwe to reaffirm crazy racist theories. I’m guessing that he hooked up with this project while hanging around UCL–anyone know for sure?) After making the photocopies and checking out possible locations for the site on Google Earth, we headed out. How hard could it be?

Several hours later, nauseous from driving fast over dunes and avoiding detention by the heavy security around a large oil refinery, we huddled together over a cracked and peeling tablecloth, sopping up steaming dal with fresh paratha. How could a site that’s 2km long with a big fort remain entirely undetectable? In previous years another team conducted a Google Earth/satellite image survey of Qatar, and placed the GPS point for Huwailah right in the middle of a trash-filled goat pen. Not so much.

This quest was becoming decidedly less romantic.

While the Google Earth map of the area showed development, I didn’t know the extent of it until I tried their “rewind” back to 2004. Mordor, aka the oil refinery that sits at the easternmost tip of this north-facing coast is visible from pretty much the entire country. The development that has been performed in conjunction with the refinery has completely altered the landscape in the area. Well, there’s that, and the giant earthen platforms that I thought were defensive emplacements, but then was told that they’re just viewing platforms for local racing.

We finished up for the day and returned to the dig compound, a bit dejected. Still, we kept at it, scouring satellite photos, playing with Google Earth, and looking up everything anyone has ever said about Huwailah. I found a reference that said that the fort was still standing to a height of 30′ in 1920. Between 1920 and 1973-1977 when it was investigated by English and French teams, it had lost 9 meters in height. Since then, it seems to have lost the rest.

It still seemed improbable that there weren’t any surface remains at all. Finally, we looked at the aerial photo taken by the French team–there was a little bit of ocean visible and a road that curved slightly to the northwest. In a modified digital extension of Prince’s principle, we overlaid the aerial photograph onto the Google Earth image…and we had a pretty good match. Sadly, I can’t show you the overlay that would disclose where we think the site is, but I will tell you…

…it’s directly in front of the food stand where we sat and argued over dal. Figures.

The site has been mostly destroyed by modern construction–indeed, the fort is undetectable and the city has been reduced to a surface scatter of pottery. Al- Huwailah, the most important pre-Zubarah and pre-Doha city in Qatar, is still by most standards, lost. Still, locating the site gives us an idea of the future of these coastal sites without protection and archaeological intervention.

Field Archaeologist: Boss, we found the lost city…but you aren’t gonna like it….